


The Leaving Season

by acaelousqueadcentrum



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6662419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaelousqueadcentrum/pseuds/acaelousqueadcentrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raising Persephone</p><p>Or,</p><p>How to watch your heart leave</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Leaving Season

Her daughter returns.

Somehow, she always returns.

Abby watches as she walks through the gates, and remembers.

The night she bled, late in her pregnancy. The doctor in her knew it was normal, of course, but the mother–

The mother sat away for hours clutching at her belly, whispering to her unborn child.

The people of the Ark stopped believing in gods when they left the Earth, but that night Abby called upon each ancient name she could remember.

But it was Demeter she prayed to the hardest, mother of loss.

Abby’s been losing Clarke since the morning the girl was born, when her mentor pulled the blue-skinned baby from her mother’s quaking body, the whole room silent but for Abby’s heavy, stilted breaths.

Losing and finding. Losing and finding. This terrible cycle. She knows now, why belief died out, why the gods lost their power over the people of Earth.

What mortal could worship a goddess helpless to save her own child?

What mortal could worship a mother who watches her daughter walk away?

She always returns, Clarke does, but at a price. At a cost, and each time, it seems, more dear. Each time, Abby knows, a little less of her daughter comes home.

She watches Clarke walk through the gates and she knows, this time the cost was high. She’s returned, but in pieces.

And Abby wonders what the price was, what part of her soul her daughter sold this time.

Her baby, her child, her one true heart.

—–

Clarke doesn’t seek her out. Why would she, all the times Abby’s let her down, all the times her mother couldn’t give her what she needed, what she deserved.

She doesn’t come to Abby, so Abby goes to her. She slips into Clarke’s rooms, past the unlikely sentry set outside the entrance. Murphy, who cannot meet her eyes. Whose mouth curves down in sorrow, the kind she never thought he had the ability to feel.

If there’s anything Clarke has always been able to inspire, Abby knows, it’s loyalty.

A demigoddess, more divine than the gods themselves, and still so terrifyingly human.

Fragile, with bones and a heart that were born for breaking.

—–

Inside, it’s dark, but Abby doesn’t need the light of a candle to see what has become of her daughter.

Clarke kneels naked before a bowl of dark water, weeping silent tears that echo through her entire body.

Her daughter’s hands are black, and smell of earth and iron, and she scrubs at them frantically, as if the color burns. And when Abby takes them in her own, holds them and feels the thick, stickiness of them, she realizes.

Blood.

And Abby feels her heart shatter into pieces.

She knows this pose, she knows this grief.

Intimately.

She goes to sleep with it at night and she wakes with it in the morning. And she would bear it a thousand times over if she could have prevented its weight from settling over her daughter’s shoulders.

She knows this ache, the way loss settles into the gut and makes a home. How it can consume you, fill every pore and suffocate every breath.

The blood on her own hands may have been metaphorical, but still, she can feel the weight of it there.

“Clarke,” she says gently, carefully, not wanting to startle her daughter. This woman is a wild animal, lost, mad in her grief.

“Clarke,” she says again, and lifts a hand to rest against the cheek she kissed in desperate joy at the sound of that first miraculous breath. Grown now, but no less a miracle, Abby knows.

Her touch breaks through the fog, and Clarke’s voice cracks as she looks up in surprise.

“Mom,” she whispers, like she can’t believe her own eyes, and collapses into Abby’s arms.

—–

It’s hours later that Abby lets her own tears fall.

After gently washing the blood from Clarke’s skin, the dirt and the grime. She’d tended the marks, those earned in strength and those received in love. Doctored the former and left the latter untouched; reminders her daughter will need in the long days to come, that love remains.

Even after loss.

Even after tragedy.

Even after the bruises and the marks fade, love remains. Love and memory.

Clarke sleeps, finally, and Abby watches–her beautiful Persephone–and waits.

The leaving season always returns.


End file.
